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Times Chief Is to Retire at Year-End

Janet L. Robinson, who served as chief executive of The New York Times Company during a time of rapid change and uncertainty in the newspaper industry, will step down at the end of the month, the company announced Thursday.

“It is with mixed emotions that I write to let you know that I am retiring from The New York Times Company,” Ms. Robinson, who has held the post since 2004, wrote in an e-mail to the staff.

The announcement caught many by surprise — both inside and outside the company. Like other newspaper companies, The Times has weathered a wrenching few years because of the recession and because of the continuing migration of advertisers and consumers online.

While the company has struggled financially, The New York Times newspaper has been particularly aggressive under Ms. Robinson’s leadership in creating new digital products and has recently built an online subscription model that has performed much better than anticipated. Ms. Robinson is widely credited with a previous transformation at the company: remaking The Times as a national newspaper in the 1990s.

“I’m very surprised, particularly with the timing of the pay wall going so well,” said Craig Huber, an equity research analyst at Access 342, an independent research shop in New Canaan, Conn.

The Times Company said that it would begin an internal and external search to find a new chief executive. In the interim, the chairman of the Times Company and the publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., will serve as chief executive, he wrote in an e-mail to staff members. Ms. Robinson will serve as a consultant for one year, and will make $4.5 million, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As the company, which is anchored by The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, places an increased reliance on digital revenue, both from consumers and Web advertising, the Times Company may be looking for a replacement with strong digital credentials, analysts said.

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Janet L. Robinson will step down at the end of the year.Credit
Bachrach

“I would assume that given the importance of digital and how much more significant that revenue is that they’d look in the digital arena to replace Janet,” said Alexia S. Quadrani, a media analyst at JPMorgan Chase.

Last Friday, Mr. Sulzberger called a meeting with Ms. Robinson on the 15th floor of the company’s Manhattan headquarters. He raised the issue of installing a different type of leadership at the company, according to people familiar with the meeting who declined to be identified discussing confidential company business.

Both Ms. Robinson and Mr. Sulzberger declined to comment.

Several analysts criticized the timing of Ms. Robinson’s departure, as she leaves with no obvious successor. “You have to give them a demerit for not having a succession plan in place,” said Alan D. Mutter, a journalism lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and a former newspaper editor.

Last month, Martin A. Nisenholtz, a senior vice president who helped shape The Times’s Web strategy from its infancy, said that he was retiring at the end of the year.

Ms. Robinson, 61, a former elementary school teacher, has worked at the Times Company for 28 years, her rise to prominence partly attributable to her close ties to Madison Avenue. Colleagues described her as cautious by nature and direct.

As chief operating officer, and, before that, as senior vice president for newspaper operations, she helped improve advertising revenue and prompted the company to expand distribution of The New York Times into markets outside the city.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote in his e-mail: “With Janet’s vision and input, we were able to convince the then corporate management to make the investment necessary and began to reposition The Times as a truly national newspaper — one that now has 58 percent of weekday and 62 percent of Sunday subscribers located outside of the New York market.”

The company faced financial problems caused by the 2008 economic crisis and the changing ways customers find the news. During Ms. Robinson’s tenure, the share price declined to less than $8 from the mid-$30s. The closing price Thursday was $7.53.

In 2009, a difficult year in the industry, Ms. Robinson was paid $4.9 million, 26 percent more than a year earlier, and her compensation rose to $5.3 million in 2010. In those years, Mr. Sulzberger made $4.8 million and $6 million, respectively. The Times Company spokesman, Robert H. Christie, said the increases were largely because in previous years both executives had agreed to scale back their pay.

David Carr contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Times Chief Is to Retire At Year-End. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe